The bar for hiring someone isn’t “would this person ‘do stuff’”, it’s “would this person be a transformative force for the company”. Or, looked at differently, we want to hire people who are so good that we’d be devastated if they quit. So don’t hire people whose refusal to work for you wouldn’t leave you devastated (or at least really upset).

“Only hire great people” is of course a startup meme, but few have the courage to actually follow through because it means turning down many candidates who are “pretty good”.

Why only hire extraordinary people?

If the criterion is “can this person do stuff” or “would this person be an effective extension of my will”, you’re committing yourself to a lot of communication overhead wherein the person will relay information to you so you can make decisions. Instead, hire great people and give them big jobs where they’ll have a bunch of information no one else has and therefore be the best situated to make big decisions on their own.

Hiring someone new is costly! It increases communication overhead (which grows super-linearly), management overhead, etc. The net effect of these costs is that the more people we have, the less agile the company will feel and the harder it will be to get things done.

Every new hire looks to the people who are already here for cues on how to act. It’s important to give new people good examples by hiring leaders you want them to emulate.

Finally, working with truly exceptional people is fun! You’re gonna spend most of your waking hours with these people—why shouldn't they be great?

What makes an A player?

One way to think about it is that an A player is someone who’s surprisingly good at their job. If you’re not consistently surprised by noticing how good someone is, they aren’t an A player.

Here’s a way to look at the components that add up to surprisingly good:

Is the person smart? Really really actually smart? Do you feel yourself getting excited just talking to them? Does reading their writing / code make you feel lightheaded (in a good way)? Note that we must still stress this question even when dealing with people with great resumes – be skeptical of your natural tendency to think “this person’s a meme, they must be smart!“

Would the person be effective in our environment? I.e., even if they are effective in their current spot, Genius is different – here we are building something brand new versus maintaining and improving something that’s already established. Not everyone wants this.

Is the person HUNGRY? Do they have GRIT? Are they looking to “make their mark”? Or do they consider their mark already made? This is the most important quality – we are trying to do something incredibly difficult and even the smartest among us will fail if they’re not down to run into the spike.

Another good heuristic is is this person good enough that you’d be down to report to them?

It’s important to stress hiring the best because it’s easy to compromise when we have so much pressure to make hires. But it’s equally important to remember that we shouldn’t let this ISM prevent us from hiring anyone at all! Worse is, after all, better.

In particular, “only hire amazing people” doesn’t mean “only hire people you are 100% sure are amazing”. It’s very hard to become 100% convinced you’re in the presence of greatness in an interview, and missing out on someone great is bad, so we must take risks! But we should only take risks on high variance people who we think might turn out to be amazing – if you’re confident that a candidate is “pretty good”, it’s a “no”.

Choosing how to spend your time is one of your most important and difficult jobs. Choose well and you’ll have a massive impact on our chance of success. Choose poorly and you might as well not be coming to work at all.

Metaphorically, when you’re at the high stakes buffet line of life trying to decide what to eat (i.e., work on), resist the bread’s siren call. It’s right there in front of you, it’ll definitely taste good in the moment, but ultimately it’s unsatisfying. Likewise in life, don’t fill up on tempting but unsatisfying small projects.

Always be asking yourself: “What am I working on? Is it the most important thing I could be doing? Do I feel urgency to complete it? Does the prospect of completing it excite me? Could Genius succeed without it?” If so it’s probably not worth doing. Work on important projects – don't fill up on bread.

This doesn’t mean you should be trying to do big projects in one go; instead, do them in small chunks by releasing your first drafts. But be aware of whether you’re taking a series of small steps toward achieving a big vision or whether you’re taking a series of unrelated small steps that lead nowhere.

Finally, because working toward big projects is hard, it’s easy to find yourself saying “okay we should be working on X, but before we can we’ll do the ‘easier’ and slightly less important project Y”. If you find yourself saying something like this, run into the spike and just work on X!

Also, if you only allow yourself to put stuff out there when it’s perfect, you’ll be much more tempted to fill up on bread. It’s much easier to write the perfect email response than it is to engineer the perfect way to advance the product / community. Restrict yourself to output that’s perfect and you’ll end up doing only projects you can execute perfectly in one go, which will be exactly those projects that don’t matter.

Finally, remember: we have nothing to lose! If we fail it will be because we didn’t seize the opportunity, not because we made too many mistakes. Ripeness is all.

Doing big, important things in life / at Genius is hard! Recognize the feeling of doing something good and hard and unnatural and learn to cherish it – you’ll accomplish big things by running into the spike, not going with the flow.

An “almost done” project is just as valuable to the company as a project you haven’t started. So always be asking yourself “how has the world changed due to my work here?” If the world isn’t any different then you haven’t accomplished anything, no matter how hard you’ve worked! Effect change on the world by taking the roast out of the oven and finishing the job.

But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give up on a bad project just because you’re close to finishing it – you should ignore sunk costs. What it does mean is that you should think carefully about how important a project is before you start so you don’t find yourself wanting to abandon it mid-stream in favor of what’s now clearly truly important.

There’s so much going on at Genius that there are unlimited ways to stay busy. But beware: just because you’re not on Facebook and are feeling busy and generally stretched thin and tired doesn’t mean you’re making progress!

Think hard about that last one – big hard projects require long, uninterrupted periods of deep thought and work. You should spend most of your time working on a single project for multiple hours, either alone or in a small group. No phone calls, no meetings, no “urgent emails”, no “offering opinions on other stuff that’s happening”.

To that last point – of all the ways to “stay busy”, checking and responding to email is by far the most pernicious.

And it’s so tempting to respond! Here is this little discrete task that’s way easier than the ambiguous project I paused to open Gmail, why not write an eloquent response? Plus, someone is definitely interested in my opinion here, maybe I can help point them in the right direction!

In addition to the time you’re spending actually meeting, meetings make it difficult to work for long, uninterrupted chunks of time – the “well I have a meeting in 25 minutes, might as well stop work now” phenomenon is very real.

When you must meet, make sure there’s a clear goal. This makes recurring meetings suspect – can you really say now that you will have a clear goal every week?

Also, stay on track! In particular, resist the temptation to fall into the weeds and start talking about a project at too low of a level – e.g., if, in a discussion about the best way to interview for a role, you find yourself on a tangent discussing the merits of one particular candidate, you have fallen into the weeds and someone can righteously call you out by doing the “weeds growing” hand gesture and saying “weeds!”.

Very rarely should you do something because “Tom wants it” or “Ilan wants it” or “[some other person] wants it”. Relatedly, you should never approach a situation with the Tom/Ilan-whisperer mindset of “my job here is to figure out what the boss wants and make it happen”. Your job is to figure out what you think is right and push for it!

Likewise, when Ilan or Tom (or anyone) stakes out a strong position, and even says “I think we should do x”, what they are REALLY saying is something more like “Here’s an idea for solving such-and-such problem. I think we should either do it, or, if you have a better idea, let’s talk about why it’s better and do it instead of my idea.”

Don’t worry about “rocking the boat” as you push for what you think is right – capsize the boat if that’s what you need to do to surface a problem. Conversely, be wary of saying / hearing “we’ve always done it this way”.

If you’re feeling awkwardness / weirdness with someone, whether it’s a peer, your manager, or a founder, talk about it with them. Emphasis on the "with them" – go feel it right to that person’s face. Don’t talk about it with others first – and if someone comes to you to discuss a problem they’re having with someone else, your goal should be to get them to talk directly to the person instead of talking to you.

Even if you’re not feeling bad vibes, over-communicate your feelings about someone so you’re on the same page with them and they know where they stand with you. When you're feeling positively about people, it's a great thing to really let them know.

Also, don’t spend a bunch of time planning how to have the perfect conversation. Worse is better – say what you feel, be as honest as possible, and pick up the pieces afterward. It probably won’t be as intense as you think because whatever you want to say probably won’t be as unexpected as you anticipate, and people are more resilient than you fear.

Make sure you give positive feedback as well, but don’t sugarcoat your criticism; be honest (but not cruel). Also, make sure you’re not simply telling someone that you’re grumpy, hungry, or that you didn’t sleep much last night. If you end up going overboard with negativity because something else was on your mind, apologize. But it’s better to err on the side of being totally honest even if it means occasionally going too far rather than the reverse.

Experts won’t solve your difficult problems so don’t expect them to save you. Run into the spike and face down ambiguous situations yourself instead of wasting time looking for the mystical expert who’ll tell you what to do.

We first learned this lesson during Y Combinator when we’d constantly have the experience of walking into a meeting thinking “This is it! This investor, or this lawyer, or this YC partner is going to tell us exactly what we should do to solve our problem and we won't have to deal with this unsettling ambiguity!”. And it never happens.

Why? Because an “expert”’s advantages in experience and knowledge are dwarfed by the advantage you have in knowing the full context and history of your problem. Put another way, to be able to help you with a truly hard problem, the expert would have to listen to you explain its contours and history for like 10 hours. Also, if the expert doesn't work here, they probably care much less about the problem than you do.

And even when it seems like an expert has sufficient context to help, chances are you think they know more than they actually do. Trust your gut about what’s right instead of blindly following an expert’s advice. And don’t assume you can’t contribute because you’re not an expert. You know more than you think.

Whatever your job, it requires public speaking – whether it’s giving a talk, pitching an investor, or just presenting a project you’ve done to your team. So it’s important to get good at pitching.

The most important aspect to being a good public speaker is being (or just acting!) excited about the idea you’re sharing and being (or just appearing!) excited to be “on stage” / presenting it to your audience.

This sounds simple but it’s a surprisingly rare skill. Even when we were in Y Combinator I was shocked by how many founding teams had trouble projecting enthusiasm for their own companies while on stage. Yes it’s hard and nerve-wracking, but this is your thing! Get excited!

(Memorizing what you plan to say (or at least not reading from something) and keeping it short are also quite important!)

The healthier you are you are, mentally and physically, the happier and more productive you will be. So whether it’s the literal gym, yoga, taking a walk, meditating, SoulCycle, or whatever, make time in which to step away from that glowing rectangle and take care of your mind and your body.

While going to the gym-esque place means you’ll be able to spend fewer seconds staring at your computer, overall it will make you more effective by getting you into a frame of mind where you feel inspired to do intense creative work.

And the converse is true as well – when you’re feeling tired and slouchy, you’ll be much more tempted to work on things that don’t matter instead of running into the spike and tackling something hard and big. So don’t fall prey to the illusion that “you have too much work to go to the gym-esque place” or that you must “skip the gym-esque place so you can get more work done”

And in general you should be thinking about how you can set aside quality time to work with high intensity on important projects, and then take real breaks – fight the temptation to be “always kind of working”; it’s exhausting and not productive.

But remember, though “staying cool” is difficult, it’s rarely enough! Don’t just “weather the storm”. Do something to fix the problem!

Finally, complaining is especially toxic during a crisis. Remember: you get ZERO credit for being right that things were fucked, and a TON of credit for turning a crisis into an opportunity. So stay positive and look for one!

More on Genius

About “The Genius ISMs”

As Dan Gilbert once put it, when you first start in business you think “company culture” is total BS—I’m just here to do good work and make some money, what’s all this touchy feely stuff?

But as things start to get bigger and more complicated and change faster it gets harder and harder for everyone to stay on the same page. So instead of constantly explaining the same stuff to everyone, we’re writing it down..

Welcome to the Genius ISMs! (Called “ISMs” (pronounced “IZ-UMMMS”) in homage to Dan)